Page 35 of Prince with a Chance of Darkness

“I don’t like you,” I shot back.

She laughed—hard. “You love me, and you know it. Who were you dreaming about? Let me guess, that one guy you met at the Frank’s Weiner cart thing.”

I grunted. “The hot dog stand is called Frank’s Weenies, and no. Not that guy.”

“The one from the library that you were all hot and heavy with a couple of weeks ago?” she asked before loading my toothbrush up with toothpaste and handing it to me. “This is said with love but brush your teeth. You have sleep breath.”

I snatched my toothbrush from her hand and made a face at her, letting her know what I thought of her commentary. “Your morning breath is no picnic there either, sweetheart.”

She got her toothbrush out and slathered toothpaste on it. “I know. Now, continue. Was it the library guy?”

I shook my head.

“Was it the dude you hooked up with from the lacrosse team?” she asked before she started brushing her teeth.

“No.”

She spit in the sink and looked at our reflections. “Help me out here. Your list of hookups is kind of long.”

“It’s not that long,” I stressed, but we both knew that was a lie. Though it had been shorter in the last few months since I’d started hooking up with my professor. Typically, I used a guy for sex but was still left wanting more. It didn’t matter how good they were in bed. It was never enough to take the edge off the hunger I felt. A hunger I couldn’t explain. But with the professor that changed. He didn’t totally take away the hunger but he filled it more than the others. “And it’s none of them. This was a new guy. A different one. Some dreamed up guy.”

As I thought about the man from my dreams, the hunger started. Like always, it started in my gut, like actual hunger pangs but it never stayed there. It always moved throughout my entire body demanding I see to its needs or else…

She grinned and waggled her brows. “Was the dream guy hot?”

“Oh yeah. At least from what I could tell,” I confessed, moving up alongside her to start brushing my teeth too.

“I want all the details,” she said as she finished brushing her teeth.

I took a second to spit and then grunted. “Me too. It was all jumbled up, and I couldn’t see his face. He had a killer accent though, and his body looked delicious. Funny enough, he had a scar that was similar to mine.”

She watched me closely. “What do you mean?”

I tapped my chest. “He has a matching one. Kind of. A decent size one like mine and then smaller ones there too.”

“You dreamed up a hot guy with matching scars?” she asked.

I shrugged. “I guess. Oh, he tasted great too.”

Her eyes widened. “You went down on him in your…”

“I bit his neck. I’m not talking about a blowjob,” I corrected.

“Wrong that a blowjob would have been less awkward to discuss than you going all fangy?” she asked.

I snorted. “Hey, don’t forget about tonight.”

She put her toothbrush in the cabinet. “How can I? The full moon is coming, and my skin is itchy.”

“This place will work,” I stressed, knowing that other twenty-two year olds weren’t worried about how they were going to keep themselves from killing others or policing the night for supernatural baddies. We didn’t have the luxury of only worrying about our final exams, graduation and then grad school come fall.

“You said that about the last ones,” Willa added.

I finished brushing my teeth. “I know. But I’m right this time.”

“I need some coffee,” she said, changing the subject.

I cringed and tried to play it cool as I went to the shower and turned on the water, waiting for it to get hot. “Uh, coffee sounds great.”

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